For anyone not familiar, Bea has coordinated for several years this call to TUDelft faculty, staff, students to share their photography skills applied to capturing images representing openness. Contributions are shared to a flickr account, and the photographer selects a Creative Commons license applied and also gets credited by name.
It’s ongoing, as I see recent photos shared just this month. I have to admit, I enjoy these kinds of sunset skies seen here in the Netherlands, similar to ones I see in Canada. The converging lines of the horizon and tree line is a strong compositional choice by the photographer.
In the past this has been run as a “competition” during Open Education Week – see the description for last year’s event. Disclosure- I have been invited to be a judge and it is a delightful duty.
So, Bea, eager minds (well mine) want to know, is We Like Sharing coming back for a 2024 photo competition? Are there new plans, ideas for this year?
Hey @cogdog, de beste wensen voor 2024 to you too!
A new open photo competition at TU Delft? Aboslutely yes!! What better way to celebrate Open Education Week?
We’ve had so much fun running it these last few years that it would be silly not to do it again. Besides, it’s so easy to get folks to be open, do open, think open (and more!) by sharing a photo!
I’ve already sat down with colleagues to plan and get things in motion: The People’s Choice award will definitely be back! Watch the space…
I was fairly confident We Like Sharing would be there this year, so having confirmation is very rewarding.
And speaking of that word, we have to again congratulate you and your TU Delft colleagues on creating an Open Education Awards for Excellence recognized project. At your session a few months ago at the OEGlobal Conference in Edmonton, you made a case (or maybe I heard it this way) that running this kind of activity is very replicable.
Do you think we might convince other institutions, organizations in other parts of the world to perhaps run their own version of We Like Sharing?
The idea of starting a photo bank came to me as I was wondering how to get colleagues and students at TU Delft to learn about Creative Commons licenses, how to attribute correctly, ALT descriptions and so forth in such a way it didn’t feel like formal training.
So I just opened a flickr account (it’s free!), added some of my photos and started asking others if they wanted to add theirs too.
It’s so so so easy to replicate! And I would love it so much to see other We Like Sharing initiatives around the globe. Can you imagine?!
BTW, I just told Joy you used one of the photos she shared and her reply was: “Ooooh that’s very exciting! The first time my photo has been used by someone other than myself”. This is also why the photo bank is there, to bring happiness to people!
I can imagine! So yes, I can see that creating a free account on flickr works well, or if you have an account, I guess you could create an album within your collection.
And for that matter, it need not be in flickr, though I think it’s ideal, especially given built in support for CC licenses. I will note that flickr does not have an editing field for alt text descriptions, it uses the title of the photo, so this is a good reason to give descriptive photo titles.
In your process, you ask people to share their photo and information by email, right? I guess one could do a google form. Or anyone can also use OEG Connect, create a topic in the DO OE Week Activities space and invite anyone to share there.
And it need not be a competition with judges and prizes (though they do help, right?) just the creation of a sharing space, where the licensing and attribution is made explicit like the way you started.
So good to hear this! That’s why I believe its best to think of attribution as a way of expressing gratitude to a person that shared openly rather than being some kind of compliance to a license.
I ask people to get in touch via email only if they do not have a gmail account. See, I created a google form thinking that most people would be able to access it to submit a photo. (I tried using MS Teams before but I found that it didn’t work for students). I know some people don’t want to go near google, and I totally respect that, so that’s why I say they can always email me their photos, if they prefer.
The form, however, is much straight forward because this way I can get the information I need to upload each photo to flickr. There’s a couple of fields that I make compulsory:
Name of the person who took the photo – this is who receives attribution as copyright holder
Title of the photo – can be whatever they like!
Short description of the photo – which will work as ALT description;
A CC license of their choice – and I add a link to the CC license chooser in case people don’t know which one to select;
A contact email address - so I can get in touch if they win.
They can also suggest tags, but this is optional. If they suggest a couple, great! If not, I’ll add them myself on their behalf. The idea is to help others find the photos, so a little effort goes a long way!
Then it’s about making as much noise as possible so that everyone knows that the competition is on, and how to find the submission form. I write a blog post that works as reference point (read last year’s here), but I also get a lot of help from my colleagues in Communications: together we target the various university newsletters, student associations, alumni etc etc. Talk to as many people as possible, word of mouth works wonders!
Of course, jury and prizes are not needed, but they help making the competition a proper competition! A jury is easy enough to find, and you don’t have to go overboard with the prizes. We have a budget of 100 euro – this gives us 25 euro per winner: three to be selected by the jury, and one by general vote. I don’t give people any cash, though; winners can select from a list of local businesses where to redeem the voucher they receive. Does this make sense to you?
I agree this is exciting, Bea, thanks for brainstorming out loud here. I am having a challenge focusing on my tasks today because I want to start setting one up for OEGlobal, so we can say for sure, there will be at least TWO versions running this year.
I will create ours in a flickr album, and I might put the instructions in the first photo that I add, plus, like you, write a blog post, and maybe add here in OEG Connect.
The Google Form makes perfect sense as you suggest, for structuring the information. I rather like adding extra worksheets to mine with formulas that format the submitting in formation, like I can see one column generating the fill information in the caption that can at least be copy/pasted to create the entry.
But how this is done is completely up to a WLS event organizer.
Do you use the file upload for the actual photo? Or do you ask for it sent by email? I have an email address I set up for OEglobal that uses a Zapier thing to monitor for new messages, and if there is an attachment, it moved it to a Google Drive.
I hope you are ready soon to add it to the new OE Week web site. One issue we had in the past was that events like We Like Sharing did not have a specific date and time when it started. But now, you can enter an event that starts at your local time 8:00am on March 5 and ends at 5:00pm March 8. When it gets published to the calendar, it will show up on every day!
Maybe we can summarize suggestions for doing a We Like Sharing.
Choose where photos will be shared (We like Flickr!)
Develop a process for how to send details (the elements you list above), via a form, email, forum post
Do we ask organizers to devise a theme relevant to where they are in the world or the work they do?
Decide how/if to offer voting/prizes (like I might tally views/comments in flickr, or maybe if I post them here in Connect, we can count the favorites)
Publish information summarizing it somewhere that can be referenced
They upload the photo via the same google form, this way they don’t need to go anywhere else. The responses are then collected onto an excel so that’s how I keep track of all the info I receive. I’m not a techie, this is super easy!
At TU Delft we are going again with the challenge to represent in a photo what openness mean to people. We went with energy transition one year to match the celebrations of the university, but experience tells us that when you make a theme a little bit limiting, it’s also more difficult. You want as much participation as possible, so go for as much freedom as possible too!
This is great, I’m ready to set mine up. Now I wonder if anyone “hearing” our conversation is interested too. Let’s see if we can make “We Like Sharing” go global.
I would love to, please let me know what to be done @cogdog. Many times I mention and refer this project - We Like Sharing with teachers to encourage their students on various projects. As now a days every student carries a camphone and giving such kind a assignments not only motivates/encourage them towards digital kills but nurturing Openness and Open license culture while students share something.
